The investigation of a multistate outbreak of Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli O157:H7 (STEC) that sickened 77 people and hospitalized 35 was traced back to ready-to-bake cookie dough, prompting infectious disease specialists to ask for stronger pasteurization and more consumer warnings.

A report in Clinical Infectious Diseases outlined the outbreak and the work done by national and local health officials to track down the source.

No single source could be identified for certain for the outbreak. But one brand of dough was present in 94% of cases, and three nonoutbreak STEC strains were isolated from it, leading to a recall of 3.6 million packages of the cookie dough.

The detective work began with May 19, 2009, through PulseNet, the network of public health and food regulatory agency laboratories coordinated by the CDC. It identified Read more »

It’s quite clear not everyone would like to read long medical reports and text as sometimes a well-designed and structured graph can say more than a hundred words. Do you remember the Wired article about the blood test makeover that described how our blood test results would be designed to show more easily understandable information to patients?

Well, this Venn diagram shows many things about hemorrhoids and related symptoms. And it’s not even a new infographics published on a blog but is from an old textbook which means the concept has been there for a long time but it always disappears in medicine.

If you want a glimpse at a company putting precision medicine into practice look no further than Prometheus Labs. They make diagnostic products for personalized care in digestive disease and oncology. I use their products to diagnose and target therapy in children with inflammatory bowel diseases (crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis).

IBD offers a nice place to see the evolution of precision diagnostics:

Early biomarker testing. Initially we had ASCA and pANCA antibodies to discern crohn’s and ulcerative colitis.

The right side of the colon seems to be the Achilles heel of colonoscopy because polyps there tend to be flat and harder to find, and we confer the least protection from later colon cancer in that zone.

A recent article summary in Journal Watch Gastroenterology concludes that when we see a right-sided colon polyp, we may have missed another, so we should go back and look again.

This provocative recommendation represents a major change in the way we normally perform colonoscopy. But the issue is, and always has been, how to identify and remove all polyps from the colon.

As self-quantification tools becomes more accessible, we’re able to monitor and collect all that’s coming, going and happening with our bodies. Some are beginning to think of this aggregate data as something of a health code, a repository of personal information which can be opened up to others – an API for your body. Once opened and tapped, others can create tools for manipulating and analyzing the data. Aggregated information that’s presented in the right way can give us and our providers valuable information about our physical status.

Loic Le Meur, the founder of Europe’s biggest Internet conference, raised the dialog here. It’s a fascinating concept and one that plays on the themes of personalization, measurement, and mobility.

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